Saturday 25th March 2017

Sorry Adam and I couldn’t make it to the last session but I hear you all got on great with Orla!

In light of some recent feedback, we are going to try a few new things at Derry CoderDojo. We appreciate all comments from our ninjas, parents and mentors so feel free to have a chat with us during the session, add a comment to this post or contact us online if you have any suggestions.

First of all, we will have a blog post, (just like this one) on our website for the beginning of each session. It will contain all new updates, information and the plan for that session. This will help ninjas who have maybe missed a session to keep up to date with what we’re up to and be a point of reference for parents also. We’ll try it out for a few weeks and if you feel it is helpful we will keep it up.

Due to the fact we are part of the CoderDojo Foundation, we need to be moving towards using their Zen website a bit more. The first step in this is that we now need all ninjas (and mentors!) to be registered as members on it so that the CoderDojo Foundation has a record of numbers. You do not need to register on Zen every week, just the once. If you haven’t already, could all our ninjas take a few minutes now to register on Zen? Just click here and then select “Join Dojo” and follow the instructions. Our events management/tickets will remain on Eventbrite for the time-being, but we may eventually move to using Zen for this also.

Now that you are all members on Zen, we can award you with Digital Badges for completing tasks! There are badges for all sorts of achievements – attendance, learning a new skill, volunteering, etc. The full list of currently available badges is available here

Well done everyone – you’ve just earned your first badge just by being here today! We’ll come around soon and award everyone with their badge

So on to earning more badges…

Beginner Ninjas

Welcome to all our new ninjas today! (And everyone who has been with us for a few weeks too!) All of our beginners will be working on Scratch today. We have some awesome new tutorials to work through which will lead on to working on your own projects.

The ninjas who are working on the product design project to design a PC enclosure will be continuing with creating a 3D model of their design and we will review its features and discuss the best way of manufacturing it.